Inventive ideas

COEUR d'ALENE - About 100 kids in grades first through eighth participated in Invent Idaho 2010, with inventions ranging from those aimed at improving the environment to those that would make living with pets easier.

"Our country is in good hands," said teacher Beth Brubaker, of Hayden Lake, who co-founded the competition with fellow teacher Diane Garmire, of Coeur d'Alene.

Awards for the competition were given out Sunday afternoon at the Silver Lake Mall.

"They look for problems in their world, big and small," Brubaker said. "We teach problem solving."

She said students that want to participate next year should tell their teachers.

Some of the inventions sought to delete video-game profanity, or come up with a less painful way to get medicine into the body rather than using a needle. Another invention tackled the problem of "nurdles," which are tiny pieces of plastic that are a manufacturing by-product that harm birds when they eat them. Others inventions simply made bathing dogs easier, or even petting dogs easier, as if that wasn't already easy enough.

Fourth grader Cassidy Wolf, 10, of Mullan Trail Elementary in Post Falls, took first place in her grade level in the non-working models category, or those that would be too large, expensive or technical to really build. The category simply requires a "blueprint" and model.

Wolf's invention aims to make Christmas lights that decorate homes look more uniform when they are hung up. Instead of string, her lights are connected by strips of Plexiglas.

Wolf, who competed this year for the third time, said she was ecstatic to win.

"How do I win when everybody else is really, really good?" she said.

She came up with the idea after working hard with her dad, Michael Wolf, 49, to put up Christmas lights. She said it takes them up two to three days to get the lights up each year.

Michael said his daughter is quite organized, and is "very particular" about how things get done.

"It's hard for him because he always cracks Plexiglas," Cassidy Wolf said.

"My friends love it," she said.

Along with non-working models, the other categories were working models, and adaptations, which are inventions that take an idea already in existence and improve on it.

There also is a games category, for computer games, board games or sport or athletic activity. And there's the Jules Verne category, named after the science fiction writer, and "encompasses all those projects that would fit into any other category but are too wild and crazy or fanciful to be judged against more practical inventions," according to the rules.

More than 40 kids like Wolf qualify to go on to the state competition in Boise, Brubaker said. The state competition is next month, she said.